Sunday, September 07, 2008

Of course, the Noble Lie is wrong-headed in the same way that all purely intellectual political analysis is wrong-headed. The intellectual thinks the masses are incapable of reason, which is true, but he then thinks that he is capable of reason, which is false. His idea of reason may be more sophisticated, but it is still subject to the same forces of irrationality as everybody else's. In all human beings, reason is just one form of commentary on the world; there are many others. Believers in the Noble Lie - or, indeed, PR, management consultancy, marketing and countless other contemporary delusions - reject this in favour of a commitment to their own rationality and expertise. They do not understand that democracy is intended to smooth out the irrationalities of the elites as much as those of the masses. That it does not always does so is neither here nor there, it does so more often than any other system. Palin is thus a creation of an anti-democratic and deluded rationality and of a failure to understand the sources of our knowledge. She is an epistemological error.

25 comments:

An epistemological error? Oh, for heaven's sake. This is an over-reaction. Politically, Palin is just another reform governor from a western state. Western states have a long tradition of such politicians.

If they cant be sticking their hands down your bra every now and then, they want to screw you with sophistry. The same, of course, has been said of Bill Clinton, himself no stranger to a fast deal or two. But then, at the basis of every great personality is a bit of nookie. And the next time Bryan beguiles you with the wisdom of his epistemology (with nobody but Wittgenstein for company) have a little sympathy; he may simply have forgotten how to have fun..

Nothing turns me on more than moose and guns! Are you guys feeling as hot as I am...?

Hahaha. Continue along this riff and you'll soon reach end point Python-stylee:

"The Vice-President is a jam doughnut.""How dare you!""I merely mean, Mr President, that Mrs Palin has a full red heart whose wisdom we are always eager to savour, mediated by an exterior whose softness of understanding is matched only by its perfection of form and exquisite shapeliness blah blah."

More Straussian/Nietzschean commentary. Randy I think you are missing the point. I think we all understand pretty well who Sarah Palin is, and liberal intellectuals aren't going to like what they see. That is natural.

Bryan's point isn't really to do with Palin herself, more the Plain phenomenon and what it is saying about the Straussian disciples, neoconservatives and the 2008 GOP, and it is all a natural consequence of Strauss's philosophy. They are so convinced of their own rationality and virtue (like the very neoconservative Tony Blair) that they can engage in this cynical exercise quite shamelessly because they have lost any sense that they could possibly be wrong or do any wrong.

In a sense they are exposing the Nietzscheann/Straussian reality that we now live in where truth is power and power is truth. The total incoherence of everything they are saying now is a testament to this--the acceptance speech built on the waste of the last 8 years and McCain's long march back to precisely the policies that have been responsible for same, the 'country first' slogan and the cynical and impulsive political manoeuvre with his VP choice.

Don't get me wrong. Oboma, the Dems and all of us are part of this. That is the point that Bryan is making.

But here is the point. We must continue to analyse what is put before us irrespective of our limitations and avoid the nihilistic sirens that John McCain (and Gordon Brown) will naturally favour--the facts (or the evidence) being so overwhelmingly unfavourable.

OMG, Dreamy, have you EVER got me laughing! And, boy, do I think you're right, too. And though Mahlerman chides me about sexual references, there's a reason for them: What does not get sublimated into action, art, what-have-you, stays at that level. So, indeedy-do, "at the basis of every great personality is a bit of nookie."

I don't know who you really are, Selena, but I would not be a bit surprised if you are a very wise drag queen along the lines of Dame Edna. Don't be offended by my saying that, but you do remind me of someone I know here in Philly who is the best of man and woman, and one hell of an actor too (starred in a production of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" I saw and will never forget).

Next time you come to the States, Bryan, you must let me take you into the Pennsylvania hinterland. Actually, I would need only to introduce you to some of my neighbors and my brother's wife. You would then see how and why Palin resonates with so many you condescendingly refer to as "the base" (presumably no pun intended). Considering the extent to which Obama has been almost entirely a media creation, in collaboration with the Democratic Party's left-wing base, the objection to Palin seems odd. The fact is that many of us over here have grown tired of having Obama shoved down our throats.

I appreciate your explanation, Chris. With that in mind, I think I gave the point as much attention as it deserved. As to your comment about "McCain's long march back to precisely the policies that have been responsible for same," it seems to me that he never marched away from them. I've never been a fan of John McCain. While it is true that there was a time when McCain's cozy relationship with the press allowed him to disguise his policy positions, McCain's extensive record of public statements and Senate votes reveals a reasonably consistent somewhat narrow mind deferential to executive branch power.

If we are to prop one candidate up in this election campaign, to be a poster child for epistemological errors in the political process, does anyone beat out Obama?

Here we have a case of someone who hasn't really done a lot, so there is little about him to justify his becoming president. He is the candidate of only hope. And we can only hope he would de a good job.

Whether he would be a good or bad president, has nothing to do with anything we know about him. We have no knowledge of how he would react in important circumstances. If we do not have that knowledge, then all we will have is epistemological errors, no matter when he would do well, and when he would do poorly. All we have is belief and how he led us to believe it.

Rus, Obama is no more an epistemological error than Sarah Palin is. Obama is a typical liberal Democrat. He's voted with his party 97% of the time while in the U.S. Senate. He never challenged party orthodoxy in his career in the Illinois General Assembly. The only outlier in his resume and policy proposals is his call for the creation of almost twenty different forms of "service corps," some of them mandatory, with enrollments beginning at age 10 or 11. The depth and breadth of those proposals are a radical departure from the norms of the Democratic Party. Otherwise, shorn of biographical details, almost all of his speeches could be comfortably delivered by almost all of his primary opponents and most of the recent presidential nominees of the Democratic Party. The only novelty is his color. Due to the current practice of aggregating as many black voters as possible into specific congressional districts, and Democratic Party rules that award extra delegates to those who overwhelm their opponents within congressional districts, Obama ended up with far more delegates than he would otherwise have secured had he been a first-term senator of Irish-American extraction with as few genuine legislative accomplishments. That's just "politics," not another example of "epistemological error."

I would not have made the point like that, because I was sticking with the decision-making process versus the beliefs within a party or the party lines.

The epistemological error that I was speaking about has to do with why the individual voter, bereft of party lines, might be making an epistemological error in deciding for Obama. That person could never say, "Hey, I was right," because the decision would be based on ignorance.

If someone were to vote for McCain because he would be brave, then when he would be brave, that person would not have made an epistemological error, because his or her decision would have been justifiable. If Palin were to become president, being a heartbeat away, and someone voted for her to be VP because of how she has handled the energy situation, when she did this again, that voter would not have made an epistemological error.

The poster child for the epistemological error in this election, is Obama. If he were to do the same thing either McCain or Palin would have done in a case where either bravery or energy savvy comes to be necessary, it would be ab epistemological error on the part of the voter who voted for him, because the original vote was not based on knowledge, only hope.

It's like buying a pig in a poke. Whether the cat comes out of the bag or not, it is an epistemological error to have completed the transaction without knowing for sure what's inside. Believing the moving animal to be a pig is different from knowing that it is a pig.

I will be teaching a class this semester, to a group of 12- and 13-year-olds at the local junior high school, on how to buy a car. Just because a car looks good, doesn't mean that it is. Just because a manufacturer thinks a car design will be safe, doesn't mean it will. There are safecar.gov, carfax.com, and other places to get information based on how the car has performed and what it's been through.

Here's a tip for staying safe on your next trip to the old West. You don't wander into a bar in those fancy new cowboy boots and tell a pretty gun-totin', moose-huntin', Democrat-chasin' lady she's an epistomological error!

Here's a philosophical question for you Bryan. What is wrong with being pro-life? Accepting a pregnant teenage daughter (together with her boyfriend) and a disabled child impresses a helluva lot of those of us left inside Plato's cave. Aggressive leftie nay-saying does not. What is so epistemologically erroneous about that?

Patrick: it's not so much that she is pro-life it's that peculiar combination of inconsistent views she holds; found only in the neoconservative. For instance she is rabidly pro-life while being very pro-death penalty.

So it is fine for the state to take away someones life in the name of justice but not ok for a rape victim to have an abortion. Maybe if a jury of the victims peers find it just she can have an abortion? I guess this 'nobody has a right to take away a life' only applies to sinful liberal doctors...

There is more but I find it's not worth dissecting; plumbing the real depths of cognitive dissonance only generally results in a headache.

I doubt those views are found only among neoconservatives Anonymous. You could invert the argument - why do liberals (for want of a better word) insist on the right to abort what could be termed the innocent but oppose the death penalty for those who are demonstrably guilty (and I would add, when it is most the popular will in the UK to have the death penalty - though we are routinely denied it)? If you examine most of us closely enough we may demonstrate a peculiar combination of inconsistencies.

Anonymous - some more thoughts: earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and elevate motherhood, but adversarial feminism that gained in affluent democracies in the 1970s preached that children and childbearing were the central instrumentality of men's subjugation of women.

An important narrative holding the left together in today's politics and culture is the one offered by adversarial feminism. For women to achieve dignity and self-fulfillment in modern society, they must distance themselves from the kind of marriage in which a mother's temptation to be with and enjoy several children becomes a synonym for holding women back and cheating them out of professional success.

Palin confronts this narrative and her apporoach so far has appealed to many ordinary folks. As a further example of cognitive dissonance, many on the left who champion women's rights tend to be the first to shout Islamophobe when the rights of women in muslim societies questioned in the West.

More cognitive dissonance - Huffington Posters (including Jamie Lee Curtis!) are shrieking that Palin's educational background isn't terribly impressive. But you can imagine if it was a minority ethnic mom who'd educated herself and ended upa a Governor she would be posited as an inspiring example.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.